The inevitable switch is happening everywhere. Governments and public offices around the world is slowly waking up to the hard fact that proprietary software may not be in their best long-term interest after all, even if you ignore the cost-factor. News about City of Munich's switch over to Linux made big waves recently, so did the news about French Army's switch to Ubuntu with primary focus on cost-cutting. UK government is the latest divulge their plans to completely switch-over from proprietary "oligopolies" to freer alternatives.

The Avatar project intends to free the Internet once again, and let the users world-over to access  information beyond borders, and be as anonymous as you want without any worries of being constantly analyzed and monitored. Once released, Avatar OS sure looks like a promising way to safeguard your privacy in the ever so vulnerable Internet of todays. Avatar will be platform agnostic and will work on all devices with a modern browser.

From an ideological perspective, Replicant OS is the mobile/tablet variant of FSF's GNU/Hurd OS. It is aimed at creating a fully free-as-in-freedom Android which is devoid of any proprietary pieces of software, and one that is also easily installable on popular devices. See our earlier article on Replicant OS to know more. Replicant OS has just hit version 4.2.

Remember that insane "developers chant" by former Mircosoft CEO Steve Ballmer? Well, Valve just pulled off something similar. In an epic goodwill gesture, Valve Inc. has decided to give away all its games, both present and future ones, to *all* Debian developers!

Well, that was fast. It seems like Pear OS, the venerable iOS look-alike, is gone forever. Just yesterday, it was announced in one of its forums that "Pear OS is no longer available for download and its future is now in hands of a company who wants to remain anonymous for the moment". A big letdown to its small but growing user base. 

It seems like Valve is not done yet when it comes to Linux and gaming. According to this recent blog post by Valve's own Rich Geldreich, they are actively working on an OpenGL debugger aimed at Linux game developers which will also be open source. 

Bitcoin is going to be big, we predicted way back in 2010. The value of Bitcoin soared from a little over 1 USD in 2011 to a mammoth 1000 USD in 2013. Bitcoin is now a world-wide phenomenon with nearly 100,000 transactions every day. The revolutionary new "internet currency" is changing the world as we know it. Be it any platform, if you want to use Bitcoins, you have to have reliable Bitcoin clients. And here we'll discuss 3 of the best free Bitcoin clients available for Ubuntu (and Linux) and the required steps for installing each one of them.

Under normal circumstances, the unmounted status of NTFS drives/partitions does not make much of a difference to the end user. A simple double-click will mount and open the drives. But with the advent of Unity and Dash search, the matter has acquired a new dimension now. Recently used files (and apps) are featured prominently and without the automounting of all drives and partitions, this feature is good as useless. 

Meizu is a Chinese smartphone manufacturing company that is rumored to release an Ubuntu Touch based smartphone in the near future. There were some leaked photos of a Meizu smartphone running Ubuntu Touch. But this video unequivocally proves that the device is for real. But still, there are no official dates of arrival or anything. Also, I don't think the guy who did this demo is not much of an experienced Ubuntu Touch user either. 

The great smartphone revolution which kick-started with the introduction of iPhone in 2007 wouldn't have happened without Corning's scratch-proof Gorilla glass technology. Most flagship smartphones today, be it Android or iOS based, has the latest Gorilla glass as one of its most important component. A Day Made of Glass was an incredibly popular video by Corning back in 2012 which looked into the future of display technology.

Ubuntu received a lot of flak for their high-handedness when they haphazardly added Amazon search results to Unity dash without taking enough feedback from end-users. The fix-ubuntu debacle didn't help either. But with their decision to include torrent search results into Unity, Canonical is undertaking some much needed damage-control exercises.

Speedtest.net is a pretty good place to check your internet speeds. But there is an even simpler way. Using the speedtest-cli command line app, you can actually check your current broadband speeds via Terminal. So here's how you do it.